The Penguin and Negative SEO

The Penguin update by Google has gotten a lot of press lately. I had a friend who runs an ecommerce website tell me how he went from #1 organic to #7. The website is a frequently updated ecommerce site that is the exact match domain for the topic.

He also mentioned that when he dropped from 1 to 4 he got an email from Google with $100 Adwords credit, and when the site went from 4 to 7 he got another email with $100 Adwords credit.

Coincidence ? Who knows.

The Penguin update brings to light the topic of spammy links and how"Negative Seo" against your competitors can work to bring their ranking down on Google. I am not an SEO expert, but Econsultancy spoke to a bunch of them and the article is well worth reading. Read the comments too, the first commenter was someone doing negative SEO.

From the article:

egative SEO is not a new concept but it is one that has recently become more mainstream. These are underhanded tactics where companies do SEO activity for their competitors so it appears that they are breaching Google's guidelines and they get penalized.

This SEO campaign then ruins the competitor's organic rankings in order to improve their own rankings. The most common practice is to build low quality, anchor text links to a specific domain in order to trigger a Google penalty for that site or specific page.

We asked some SEO experts in the UK and US their opinions on negative SEO, what techniques are being used and how you can prevent it from happening to you.